To begin with use DL380 G7 server as the Host for Hyper-V 2012 fill it up with 900GB 10K disk. Use HP VSA for virtual storage.

Setup a new Exchange server to transition to Exchange 2010.

P2V an application server running on DL320 G6 and move it to the new Hyper-V server.

Use the now freed up DL320 G6 to convert into a new Hyper-V 2012 host. Fill it up with 10K disks. Install HP VSA and cluster the 2 VSA's.

Add more P2V servers to the host. As time goes add one more Hyper-V host(DL380G5) with VSA to make it part of the cluster.

Ideally it would have been nice to start with 2 Hosts to begin with but we have to utilize our existing hardware as much as we can.

Will this plan work. How easy is it for add more storage (which will come with the new hosts) to the HP VSA cluster. How will the storage redundancy work in the first instance when i will only have one server as the host for some time till i migrate/convert one physical server to virtual to free up the physical host.

Re: Consolidation Hyper-V 2012 and HP VSA

I would highly suggest starting off with TWO hyper-v hosts runing TWO VSA instances (total). When you put "all your eggs in one basket", I suggest you ensure its as reliable as possible. With two VSA nodes and two hyper-v hosts, you should be able to ensure 99.99% availability, while with only one host/VSA you will have to have downtime both for updates to the hyper-v host and to the VSA software.

The drawback is that you essentially need 2x the number of disks and 2x the licensing for hyper-v and VSAs, but I see a 2:2 ratio as the minimum production requirement. Any less and you WILL eventually have a problem and then it will kill any future for your plan and not because the idea isn't good, but because the execution wasn't correct. If you want to reuse one or two of your current physcial computers to be a host, that should be no problem. I wouldn't plan on spending weeks with only one host, but a shorter time should not be a problem and its easy to transition from one node to multiple VSAs while the system stays online.

To answer your question about how easy it is to add VSA nodes later... the answer is: extreemely. With the caviot, that unless you want to be really inefficient, the VSA's CPU speeds and underlying HDD structure should be as similar as possible if not identical. The reason is that each VSA node acts like a HDD in a tradtitional raid group.... you wouldn't want to make a raid group of 3x 147GB 15k disks with one 2TB 5.4k disk would you?... don't do a similar thing to the VSAs and you would be good... the overall system speed it limited by the speed of the slowest node and the capacity is limited by the smallest capacity node... just like what happens when you create a traditional raid group.